Telegraph Avenue Parking-Protected Bike Lanes Show Stunning Results

More biking, more walking, less speeding, fewer collisions, less delay

Less than a year after opening a dramatic redesign of Telegraph Avenue in downtown Oakland, the city is reporting huge benefits from the project. According to the new Oakland DOT’s short Progress Report: Telegraph Avenue Complete Streets [PDF], the new parking-protected bike lanes, while flawed, are already producing more-than-promising results.

For the first time in five years, says the report, there have been no pedestrian crosswalk collisions reported along the section of the street that was reconfigured. The total number of collisions along the corridor decreased by forty percent in 2016 compared to the average number of collisions between 2012 and 2015. The lanes opened in April last year.

This is happening even though there are a lot more people biking (up 78 percent) and walking (up 100 percent) along the corridor than before the lanes went in. Not surprisingly, most bicycle riders and pedestrians using Telegraph say they feel safer with the new configuration, which places parked cars between bike riders and traffic and shortens the distance pedestrians have to cross travel lanes.

The new design reduced the number of travel lanes to one, which horrified many people who thought that would mean traffic would grind to a halt. That hasn’t happened—but speeding has gone down significantly. Median speeds there now match the actual posted speed limit of 25 miles per hour. On the part of Telegraph that was not reconfigured—where there are still two travel lanes in each direction, parking along the curb, no bike lane, and no median—speeds stayed high, with 85 percent of drivers going over the speed limit.

Telegraph’s reconfiguration included a road diet, a new parking-protected bike lane, and a new median with turn lanes.

“We are excited to show how you could measure changes as a result of this project,” said Sarah Fine, a planner with Oakland’s new Department of Transportation and one of the authors of the report. “We can measure changes in speed and volumes, but we can also get a better picture of how the street functions for everyone. It’s nice that it bears out the way we thought it would.”

The report relies on a variety of data sources, including street surveys conducted by city planners in May and June of last year, collision data from the Oakland Police Department, and speed measurements made in June and September of last year.

The city’s report is a summary of information collected by the planning firm Fehr and Peers. That memo [PDF] contains more interesting information than just what made it into this summary. For example, the “pedestrian yield rate” along the newly configured street changed dramatically. That is, pedestrians trying to cross Telegraph at marked but unsignaled crosswalks do not have to wait as long as they used to for a car to stop so they can cross. Before the project, a pedestrian waited on average for four cars to pass before the fifth car would stop. Now, cars stop much more willingly, and pedestrians usually only have to wait for one car to pass before a car yields, if that.

It’s easy to guess why. With only one travel lane, drivers are not searching for opportunities to zoom around each other, and they are forced to drive at the same pace as other vehicles. That means a more reasonable driving speed, which gives them the chance to see pedestrians as soon as they step into the crosswalk.

The report notes a few additional trends along the corridor. Bus ridership along Telegraph has decreased somewhat. That may be due to service changes along the corridor, wherein a popular route was split in two shorter routes, and its express service was eliminated.

The city’s progress report also notes that local business sales taxes increased last year, and five new businesses have opened in the neighborhood since the project went in. But it stops short of taking credit for these changes as a result of the new streetscape. This section of Telegraph is home to First Fridays, a wildly popular monthly event that closes the street to car traffic and showcases local art in the evenings. That, and new local development, have also contributed to robust local sales revenue.

The new configuration is not without flaws, as the report notes. Cars frequently park in the lanes, for example. Since May of last year, Oakland parking enforcement officers have doubled the number of parking tickets they write. However, the city also acknowledges that writing tickets is not a permanent solution, and more must be done to make it clear to drivers where the parking lane is.

Oakland has funding from the Active Transportation Program for a second phase of the project and plans to add “vertical separators,” sometimes called “soft-hit posts,” to more clearly delineate the bike lane. Those may be added as soon as the next month or so. In addition, some street areas that are currently painted beige have not been easily understood by users as keep-clear zones, and the city is considering how to change those markings to make it more obvious.

In the future, raised curbs, improved crossings, and some signal changes are being planned, as are bus islands to help transit riders more easily board buses. Final designs for these last improvements are still in the planning stages, with the funding becoming available in 2019.

“We want to make sure everyone knows about what we’re considering doing,” said Fine. “We’ve been in touch with local stakeholders, particularly people involved with First Fridays, because we want to meet everyone’s needs in this process.” This report was a first step toward acknowledging some of the feedback the city has already received, as well as a way to present data so everyone can be on the same page.

The positive trends reported here bode well for figuring out solutions to problems engineers have long considered intransigent, such as getting drivers to slow down and reducing collision risks for pedestrians. The data in this report will be useful for any city that wants to slow down speeding vehicles but is facing complaints that road diets will cause traffic congestion.

Cities can’t please everyone on every block, and shouldn’t try. You obviously aren’t a very loyal customer, so you won’t be missed (much). Meanwhile you’ll shop somewhere else.

Bernard Finucane

Plant trees on those tan spots and you’d have a beautiful street.

Kenji Yamada

I see people of all ages, apparent income levels, and apparent racial identities going through downtown Oakland on bicycles several days a week. Are you including all of them among “hipster elitists”?

Love2Ride2

That’s an amazing result! Good job! Keep up the good work!

Love2Ride2

Let me interpret from Entitleddriverese to English for you: “Transit” = automobiles.

Since drivers have enjoyed 100 years of subsidy, transportation planning and urban domination, if MORE auto lanes aren’t added, any other improvement is a “barrier.”

Melanie

What are the transit barriers? Bus stops are fully functional, and will be even better once bus bulbs are built, which will give riders a platform on which to wait for, mount, and dismount buses. It’s easier for everyone on foot and/or with mobility devices to cross the street, with shorter crossing distances and slower traffic. If you’re referring to the changes in bus service, those had nothing to do with the new bike lanes.

Tim

This has been a disaster. I never shop on telegraph anymore. The hipster elitist bike lobby excludes families, the disabled, and the elderly from full participation in our city by erecting transit barriers. Shame

Prinzrob

Are you talking about the area at the bottom of the photo? That’s Telegraph Ave from 20th Street south, which was outside the scope of this protected bikeway project but could possibly be upgraded as part of a later phase.

This initial phase of the Telegraph Ave streetscape project was implemented alongside a paving project from 20th to 27th Streets, which provided an opportunity for the city to experiment with a parking protected bikeway there with support from the business district. A much more expensive phase 2 is in design now, via a state ATP grant, which will add bus stop enhancements and extend the bikeway further north.

It would be amazing to upgrade all of Telegraph all at once, but the way funding works only a little segment at a time is feasible.

joechoj

No, I think you’re only missing how conservative city planners are, and how slowly the wheels of change turn in city bureaucracy.

Jason

Responding to the picture on that cover at the start of the article:

Is there something I’m missing about why the bike lane isn’t just parking-protected the entire way? Given what we know about how little drivers respect the paint-only buffers for bike lanes it seems silly to not just restripe the entire street to have parking-protected bike lanes.

I would love to see it extended not only to Alcatraz but all the way to Dwight Way.

As for the 1R, don’t hold your breath. The BRT line from downtown Oakland to downtown Berkeley was killed off by agitated merchants. AC Transit shortened the project to run between downtown Oakland and San Leandro only.

Alexander Craghead

Can we now get it extended all the way to Alcatraz, the edge of city limits? And can we PLEASE get the 1R back?

Nextdoor. Dude. Are you in the part of Oakland where your NextDoor feed is 24×7 derangement about road diets (Park Blvd, Joaquin Miller)? It’s horrible where I live.

RichardC

Thanks, for this update, Melanie! I think this report hits the nail on the head: on the one hand, it provides an excellent summary of the benefits the project is already providing (which I plan to share with NextDoor nay-sayers), and on the other hand acknowledges that there’s still work to be done to address problems with the design (e.g. parking in the bike lanes, the beige paint that isn’t working).

I think Telegraph is a good case study showing that paint alone isn’t enough to help people understand how to drive and park with parking-buffered bike lanes, so engineers should include vertical elements from the beginning to make these configurations clear to users.

When DOT presented plans for a protected bike lane on Sixth Avenue, one point of contention was the design of intersections. How many intersections will get split-phase signals, where cyclists and pedestrians crossing the street get a separate signal phase than turning drivers? And how many will get “mixing zones,” where pedestrians and cyclists negotiate […]